M. de Lescure was a married man, about twenty-seven years of age, of grave and studious habits, but nevertheless of an active temperament.  He was humane, charitable, and benevolent:  his strongest passion was the love of his fellow-creatures; his pure heart had glowed, at an early age, with unutterable longings for the benefits promised to the human race by the school of philosophy from which the revolution originated.  Liberty and fraternity had been with him principles, to have realized which he would willingly have sacrificed his all; but at the commencement of the revolution he had seen with horror the successive encroachments of the lower classes, and from conscience had attached himself to the Crown.  Hitherto he had been without opportunity of showing the courage for which he was afterwards so conspicuous; he did not even himself know that he was a brave man; before, however, his career was ended, he had displayed the chivalry of a Bayard, and performed the feats of a Duguescin.  A perfect man, we are told, would be a monster; and a certain dry obstinacy of manner, rather than of purpose, preserved de Lescure from the monstrosity of perfection.  Circumstances decreed that the latter years of his life should be spent among scenes of bloodshed; that he should be concerned in all the horrors of civil war; that instruments of death should be familiar to his hands, and the groans of the dying continually in his ears.  But though the horrors of war were awfully familiar to him, the harshness of war never became so; he spilt no blood that he could spare, he took no life that he could save.  The cruelty of his enemies was unable to stifle the humanity of his heart; even a soldier and a servant of the republic became his friend as soon as he was vanquished.

Two young friends had followed M. de Lescure to Paris—­Henri de Larochejaquelin and Adolphe Denot.  The former was the son of the Marquis de Larochejaquelin, and the heir of an extensive property in Poitou; M. de Lescure and he were cousins, and the strictest friendship had long existed between the families.  Young Larochejaquelin was of a temperament very different from that of his friend:  he was eager, impetuous, warm-tempered, and fond of society; but he had formed his principles on those of M. de Lescure.  The love of his fellow-creatures was not with him the leading passion of his heart, as it was with the other; but humanity had early been instilled into him as the virtue most necessary to cultivate, and he consequently fully appreciated and endeavoured to imitate the philanthropy of his friend.

At the time alluded to, Henri de Larochejaquelin was not quite twenty years of age.  He was a lieutenant in the body-guard immediately attached to the King’s person, and called the “Garde du Roi.”  At any other period, he would hardly yet have finished his education, but the revolution gave a precocious manhood to the rising generation.  Henri’s father, moreover, was very old; he had not married till late in life; and the young Marquis, when he was only seventeen, had to take on himself the guardianship of his sister Agatha, and the management of the paternal property.  The old man was unable to leave his chair, and though he still retained his senses, was well pleased to give up to the son of his old age the rights and privileges which in the course of nature would descend to him.